Beyond grateful
The allure and limits of gratitude practice
Warning: this meandering essay contains spoilers for the 1960 film Pollyanna, some heavy personal shit, as well as discourse on religious topics through an atheistic lens that is bound to displease both sides of that old debate. If you stick with it, you may find something worthwhile that you weren’t expecting, which is what happened to me in writing it. Enjoy!
Throughout the pandemic I’ve had many a conversation that went something like this. You ask how someone is. “Fine?” they say, hesitant, ambivalent. Because nobody is truly fine right now. Then, reluctantly, they begin to share whatever’s been going on. As you start to nod empathetically, the speaker will catch themselves. “But I really can’t complain,” they interject. “I have so much to be grateful for.”
Sometimes it’s the person I’m speaking to who does this. Sometimes it’s me. The result is always the same, though. The conversation peters out, unresolved and unsatisfying.
The practice of gratitude in its simplest of forms asks only that you pause to acknowledge what is right and good in any given moment. For such an accessible practice, the benefits are potentially life changing. According to many an article on the latest gratitude research, if you just spend 15 minutes each day contemplating things you’re grateful for, you will sleep better, exercise more, thrive at work and in your relationships, have better self-esteem, make us more happy, more generous, lower blood pressure, avoid depression, and the list goes on.
The problem is, practices don’t work as quickly or obviously as, say, penicillin. Besides, very few people will actually take 15 minutes a day to do it. And even fewer will keep those 15 minutes a day going long enough to experience the transformative softening of spirit and broadening of perspective, which may or may not help you sleep better, that comes from slow, steady practice of any kind.
But these pesky realities have done little to dampen our current enthusiasm for gratitude. In addition to the countless articles and posts encouraging people to count their blessings in order to create more blessings, there are gratitude journals for sale, gratitude meditations available on YouTube or by app, corporate trainings, workshops, Ted Talks, and books.
So now everyone knows they should be practicing gratitude, and almost nobody is doing it in a committed way. We declare ourselves grateful without having done the work of gratitude. This takes on many meager forms from marking boastful social media posts #grateful, so the world knows we don’t take our blessings for granted, to cutting ourselves short when we really do need to vent our troubles, because we’re supposed to be grateful.
Before there was gratitude practice there was Pollyanna. In the 1960s film starring Hayley Mills, the young, recently orphaned Pollyanna arrives in a podunk town full of angry, miserable people. A vein of humorless, religious piety runs through the place. The reverend preaches fire and brimstone from the pulpit, while the townsfolk practice charity out of obligation rather than any real caring. The most miserable of them all is Pollyanna’s aunt, an imperious spinster, who’s obliged to take the girl in, though she seems determined to do as little as possible on her behalf.
Pollyanna seems undistressed. Looking on the bright side is a practice her missionary father imparted before departing this world. She loses no time in practicing it with religious conviction on everything and everyone around her.
Pollyanna’s relentless optimism causes friction with those around her, at first, but in time begins to break through. This is the power of gratitude, to pull us and others out of our self-pitying, single minded focus on all that’s wrong to the exclusion of all that’s right. Before long the townspeople are smiling again, helping one another, and planning a county fair. Yay?
Taken too far, gratitude can become a denial of life’s dark side. This, for Pollyanna, proves almost fatal. She sneaks out her bedroom window and descends a tree to attend the county fair, which her aunt has, of course, forbidden her to attend. On her return, she loses her footing and plunges several stories to the ground, leaving her paralyzed.
Things take an even darker turn as those she’s taught to look on the bright side attempt to use her practice to cheer her up. If you have suffered trauma or loss, then you know, the platitudes people throw your way burn like acid on your fresh wounds. Pollyanna responds as you’d expect, to wince and turn away.
The film ends with Pollyanna’s bewildering exit from the town that her bright spirits have transformed. We’re supposed to come away feeling like the joy Pollyanna spread to others is now there to support her in her time of need, but the film can’t quite pull it off. Pollyanna departs the town not only orphaned, but now with a life-altering injury, and being carted off to have an experimental surgery, which, given that it’s the 19th century, doesn’t feel exactly hopeful. Although she smiles and waves a bit as she goes, it feels obligatory. She has tried to insulate herself against the horrors of this world — and failed — leaving us viewers uncertain how to feel about it all.
I recently undertook a personal exercise where I charted out the path my life had taken, grouping together periods of time into phases that, in retrospect, I could now see clearly. Early childhood, adolescence, college, and various periods of adulthood. For each phase I noted in the left-hand column the challenges and traumas that were out of my control. In the right-hand column, I wrote down the wonderful, surprising, and good things that were also out of my control — as in, I’d done nothing to bring them about. The center was the role I played in each of these phases. How I made things better for myself. And worse.
When I’d finished, the chart was remarkably balanced. I hadn’t expected that. I’ve experienced an unusual amount of hardship and trauma, and I’ve had to summon an incredible amount of strength and grit to live a life that’s not in thrall to the resulting wounds. While I’ve always been aware that my life had been a very mixed bag, I’d overlooked just how much dumb luck, fortuitous coincidences, and more had come to my aid over the years.
The list included concrete things like the grandparents that took in my mother, brother, and I and set us on our feet after my violently abusive father set our house on fire. Being born with musical talents that led me to theater, which provided an early escape route from the clutches of the soul-crushing church I was otherwise required to go to. Discovering the cause and cure for my repeat miscarriages — at the time, still a theory circulating on the outskirts of medicine — just before our last round of IVF, resulting in the birth of our only child. I also listed out things like writing, which gave me a way to make sense of my world from a very early age, and art, which let me know I wasn’t alone in my weird way of seeing the world. And these are but a few of numerous instances of … what?
I could have written, “things I’m grateful for” above that right-hand column, and it would have been true. I am incredibly grateful for all these things. But that word felt inadequate, a mereacknowledgement of something far greater at play. What was it? Not miracles. Recalling the hymn I sang as a child who’d experienced far too much hardship far too young, I labeled the column on the right “grace” and let the deep, aching weight of that word wash over me.
Britannica defines grace in the Christian sense of the word, as “the spontaneous, unmerited gift of the divine favour in the salvation of sinners, and the divine influence operating in individuals for their regeneration and sanctification.” I can’t say that definition does much for me. Personally, I find that the more you ascribe the source of grace to a specific figure, religion, or concept, the more its power and wonder is reduced.
For me grace is simply the inexplicable goodness, benevolence, luck, whatever you want to call it, that is simply present (along with its opposite) in the universe at any given time.
Grace cannot be earned any more than sudden, unexpected tragedy is earned. You cannot manipulate it into coming your way. When it comes to you, it is as inexplicable as when a sudden disaster befalls you.
Grace doesn’t mean everything works out as it should. It doesn’t mean there’s some hidden master plan in which you are a pawn playing out your little role. Trust me on this. People say to me all the time, after hearing some hard detail of my life, “but you turned out alright.” And I say to myself, sure, I did, but my brother committed suicide. Surviving and thriving is not a given in this life, no matter how much help comes our way. Some of us make it. Many don’t.
But if you happen to survive, grace is whatever supports you through the valley of the shadow of death, equips you with what you need to survive — purpose, love, meaning, tools, you name it — and delivers you on the other side.
Grace, unlike gratitude, cannot be practiced. But it can consciously be received and accepted for what it is. I’d argue that to experience the full benefits of grace, you must consciously receive it. It is humbling to recognize that you are not in control, even (especially) of the good that comes your way. That humility is the first step for transformation. And isn’t that what we’re all really seeking when we commit to any practice, gratitude or otherwise?
Yeesh. I started this essay writing some observations about gratitude and it led me, as all good paths do, somewhere unexpected and lovely, at grace’s door. And now that I’m here, I’m not quite sure how to get back. But that, I think, is the true point of practices like gratitude and many others. They are and they aren’t a means to an end. By which I mean, one undertakes a practice with the understanding that if you do something in a committed way, with no expectations, over and over again — things will happen, but you don’t have control over what those things will be. Or where they will lead.
That can be a bitter pill to swallow during this pandemic, when so much has been revealed to be wildly out of our control. If only not complaining because we have so much to be grateful for would make it all fine again. It won’t, so don’t bother. Instead, if you’re not really sick, or out of work, or struggling to keep a business afloat, or grieving the loss of a loved one , and especially if you are , consistently doing some kind of practice — be it gratitude, journaling, praying, meditating, making art, yoga, taking long walks, praying, talking to yourself, or whatever—may help you bear it. It may even become your saving grace.
